Children of the Lens (25 page)

"Mighty interesting, and I'd like to, but I'm right in the middle of a job," Kinnison replied, and went on to explain rapidly what he, as Bradlow Thyron, had done and what he still had to do. "As soon as I can get away I'll come over. In the meantime, chum, keep away from there. Do a flit—find something else to keep you amused until I can join you."

Worsel set out, and after a few day—or weeks? Idle time means practically nothing to a Velantian—a sharply-Lensed thought drove in.

"Help! A Lensman calling help! Line this thought and come fast…" The message ended as sharply as it had begun; in a flare of agony which, Worsel knew, meant that that Lensman, whoever he was, had died.

Since the thought, although broadcast, had come in strong and clear, Worsel knew that its sender had been close by. While the time had been very short indeed, he had been able to get a line of sorts. Into that line he whirled the Velan's sharp prow and along it she hurtled at the literally inconceivable pace of her maximum drive. As the Gray Lensman had often remarked, the Velantian super-dreadnought had more legs than a centipede, and now she was using them all. In minutes, then, the scene of battle grew large upon her plates.

The Patrol ship, hopelessly outclassed, could last only minutes longer. Her screens were down; her very wall-shield was dead. Red pockmarks sprang into being along her sides as the Boskonian needle-beamers wiped out her few remaining controls. Then, as the helplessly raging Worsel looked on, his brain seething with unutterable Velantian profanity, the enemy prepared to board; a course of action which, Worsel could see, was changed abruptly by the fact—and perhaps as well by the terrific velocity—of his own unswerving approach. The conquered Patrol cruiser disappeared in a blaze of detonating duodec; the conqueror devoted his every jet to the task of running away; strewing his path as he did so with sundry hems of solid and explosive destruction. Such things, however, whether inert or free, were old and simple stuff to the Velan's war-wise crew. Their spotters and detectors were full out, as was also a forefan of annihilating and disintegrating beams.

Thus none of the Boskonian's missiles touched the Velan, nor, with all his speed, could he escape. Few indeed were the ships of space able to step it, parsec for parsec, with Worsel's mighty craft, and this luckless pirate vessel was not one of them. Up and up the Velan rushed; second by second the intervening distance lessened. Tractors shot out, locked on, and pulled briefly with all the force of their stupendous generators.

Briefly, but long enough. As Worsel had anticipated, that savage yank had, in the fraction of a second required for the Boskonian commander to recognize and to cut the tractors, been enough to bring the two inertialess warcraft almost screen to screen.

"Primaries! Blast!" Worsel hurled the thought even before his tractors snapped. He was in no mood for a long-drawn-out engagement. He might be able to win with his secondaries, his needles, his tremendously powerful short-range stuff, and his other ordinary offensive weapons; but he was taking no chances.

One! Two! Three! The three courses of Boskonian defensive screen scarcely winked as each, locally overloaded, flared through the visible into the black and went down.

Crash! The stubborn fabric of the wall-shield offered little more resistance before it, too, went down, exposing the bare metal of the Boskonian hull—and, as is well known, any conceivable material substance simply vanishes at the touch of such fields of force as those.

Driving projectors carved away and main batteries silenced, Worsel's needle-beamers proceeded systematically to riddle every control panel and every lifeboat, to make of the immense space-rover a completely helpless hulk.

"Hold!" An observer flashed the thought. "Number Eight slip is empty—Number Eight lifeboat got away!"

"Damnation!" Worsel, at the head of his armed and armored storming party, as furiously eager as they to come to grips with the enemy, paused briefly. "Trace it—or can you?"

"I did. My tracers can hold it for fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty. No longer than twenty."

Worsel thought intensely. Which had first call, ship or lifeboat? The ship, he decided. Its resources were vastly greater; most of its personnel were probably unharmed. Given any time at all, they might be able to jury-rig a primary, and that would be bad—very bad. Besides, there were more people here; and even if, as was distinctly possible, the Boskonian captain had abandoned his vessel and his crew in an attempt to save his own life, there was plenty of time.

"Hold that lifeboat," he instructed the observer. "Ten minutes is all we need here."

And it was. The Boskonians—barrel-bodied, blocky-limbed monstrosities resembling human beings about as much as they did the Velantians—wore armor, possessed hand-weapons of power, and fought viciously. They had even managed to rig a few semi-portable projectors, but none of these was allowed a single blast. Spy-ray observers were alert, and needle-beam operators; hence the fighting was all at hand to hand, with hand-weapons only. For, while the Velantians to a man lusted to kill, they had had it drilled into them for twenty years that the search for information came first; the pleasure of killing, second.

Worsel himself went straight for the Boskonian officer in command. That wight had a couple of guards with him, but they did not matter—needle-ray men took care of them. He also had a pair of heavy blasters, which he held steadily on the Velantian. Worsel paused momentarily; then, finding his screens adequate, he slammed the control-room door shut with a flick of his tail and launched himself, straight and level at his foe, with an acceleration of ten gravities. The Boskonian tried to dodge but could not. The frightful impact did not kill him, but it hurt him, badly. Worsel, on the other hand, was scarcely jarred. Hard, tough, and durable, Velantians are accustomed from birth to knockings-about which would pulverize human bones.

Worsel batted the Boskonian's guns away with two terrific blows of an armored paw, noting as he did so that violent contact with a steel wall didn't do their interior mechanisms a bit of good. Then, after cutting off both his enemy's screens and his own, he batted the Boskonian's helmet; at first experimentally, then with all his power. Unfortunately, however, it held. So did the thought-screen, and there were no external controls. That armor, damn it, was good stuff!

Leaping to the ceiling, he blasted his whole mass straight down upon the breastplate, striking it so hard this time that he hurt his head. Still no use. He wedged himself between two heavy braces, flipped a loop of tail around the Boskonian's feet, and heaved. The armored form flew across the room, struck the heavy steel wall, bounced, and dropped. The bulges of the armor were flattened by the force of the collision, the wall was dented—but the thought-screen still held!

Worsel was running out of time, fast. He couldn't treat the thing very much rougher without killing him, if he wasn't dead already. He couldn't take him aboard; he had to cut that screen here and now! He could see how the armor was put together; but, armored as he was, he could not take it apart. And, since the whole ship was empty of air, he could not open his own.

Or could he? He could. He could breathe space long enough to do what had to be done. He cut off his air, loosened a plate enough to release four or five hands, and, paying no attention to his laboring lungs, set furiously to work. He tore open the Boskonian's armor, snapped off his thought-screen. The creature wasn't quite dead yet—good! He didn't know a damn thing, though, nor did any member of his crew… but… a ground-gripper—a big shot—had got away. Who, or what was he?

"Tell me!" Worsel demanded, with the full power of mind and Lens, even while he was exploring with all his skill and speed. "TELL ME!"

But the Boskonian was dying fast. The ungentle treatment, and now the lack of air, were taking toll. His patterns were disintegrating by the second, faster and faster. Meaningless blurs, which, under Worsel's vicious probing, condensed into something which seemed to be a Lens.

A Lensman? Impossible—starkly unthinkable! But jet back—hadn't Kim intimated a while back that there might be such things as Black Lensmen?

But Worsel himself wasn't feeling so good. He was only half conscious. Red, black, and purple spots were dancing in front of every one of his eyes. He sealed his suit, turned on his air, gasped, and staggered. Two of the nearest Velantians, both of whom had been en rapport with him throughout, came running to his aid; arriving just as he recovered full control.

"Back to the Velan, everybody!" he ordered. "No time for any more fun—we've got to get that lifeboat!" Then, as soon as he had been obeyed: "Bomb that hulk… Good! Flit!"

Overtaking the lifeboat did not take long. Spearing it with a tractor and yanking it alongside required only seconds. For all his haste, Worsel found in it only a something that looked as though it once might have been a Delgonian Lensman. It had blown itself apart. Because of its reptilian tenacity of life, however, it was not quite dead: its Lens still showed an occasional flicker of light and its disintegrating mind was not yet entirely devoid of patterns. Worsel studied that mind until all trace of life had vanished. Then he called Kinnison.

"…so you see I guessed wrong. The Lens was too dim to read, but he must have been a Black Lensman. The only readable thought in his mind was an extremely fuzzy one of the planet Lyrane Nine. I hate to have hashed the job up so; especially since I had one chance in two of guessing right."

"Well, no use squawking now…" Kinnison paused in thought. "Besides, he could have done it anyway, and would have. You haven't done too badly, at that. You found a Black Lensman who isn't a Kalonian, and you've got confirmation of Boskonian interest in Lyrane Nine. What more do you want? Stick around fairly close to the Hell- Hole, Slim, and as soon as I can make it, I'll join you there."

Chapter Twenty

Kinnison And The Black Lensman

"Boys, take her upstairs," Klnnison-Thyron ordered, and the tremendous raider—actually the Dauntless in disguise—floated serenely upward to a station immediately astern of Mendonai's flagship. All three courses of multi-ply defensive screen were out, as were full-coverage spy-ray blocks and thought-screens.

As the fleet blasted in tight formation for Kalonia III, Boskonian experts tested the Dauntless' defenses thoroughly, and found them bottle-tight. No intrusion was possible. The only open channel was to Thyron's plate, which was so villainously fogged that nothing could be seen except Thyron's face. Convinced at last of that fact, Mendonai sat back and seethed quietly; his pervasive Kalonian blueness pointing up his grim and vicious mood.

He had never, in all his life, been insulted so outrageously. Was there anything—anything!—he could do about it? There was not. Thyron, personally, he could not touch—yet—and the fact that the outlaw had so brazenly and so nonchalantly placed his vessel in the exact center of the Boskonian fleet made it pellucidly clear to any Boskonian mind that he had nothing whatever to fear from that fleet.

Wherefore the Kalonian seethed, and, his minions stepped ever more softly and followed with ever-increasing punctilio the rigid Boskonian code. For the grapevine carries news swiftly; by this time the whole fleet knew that His Nibs had been taking a God-awful kicking around, and the first guy who gave him an excuse to blow his stack would be lucky if he only got skinned alive.

As the fleet spread out for inert maneuvering above the Kalonian atmosphere, Kinnison turned again to the young Lensman.

"One last word, Frank. I'm sure everything's covered—a lot of smart people worked on this problem. Nevertheless, something may happen, so I'll send you the data as fast as I get it. Remember what I told you before—if I get the dope we need, I'm expendable and it'll be your job to get it back to Base. No heroics. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir." The young Lensman gulped. "I hope, though, that it doesn't…"

"So do I," Kinnison grinned as he climbed into his highly special dureum armor, "and the chances are a million to one that it won't. That's why I'm going down there."

In their respective speedsters Kinnison and Mendonai made the long drop to ground, and side by side they went into the office of Black Lensman Melasnikov. That worthy, too, wore heavy armor; but he did not have a mechanical thought-screen. With his terrific power of mind, he did not need one. Thyron, of course, did; a fact of which Melasnikov became instantly aware.

"Release your screen," he directed, bruskly.

"Not yet, pal—don't be so hasty," Thyron advised. "Some things about this here hook-up don't exactly click. We got a little talking to do before I open up."

"No talk, worm. Talk, especially your talk, is meaningless. From you I want, and will have, the truth, and not talk. CUT THOSE SCREENS!"

* * *

And lovely Kathryn, in her speedster not too far away, straightened up and sent out a call.

"Kit—Kay—Cam—Con… are you free?" They were, for the moment. "Stand by, please, all of you. I'm pretty sure something is going to happen. Dad can handle this Melasnikov easily enough, if none of the higher-ups step in, but they probably will. Their Lensmen are probably important enough to rate protection. Check?"

"Check."

"So, as soon as dad begins to get the best of the argument, the protector will step in," Kathryn continued, "and whether I can handle him alone or not depends on how high a higher-up they send in. So I'd like to have you all stand by for a minute or two, just in case."

How different was Kathryn's attitude now than it had been in the hyper-spatial tube! And how well for Civilization that it was!

"Hold it, kids, I've got a thought," Kit suggested. "We've never done any teamwork since we learned how to handle heavy stuff, and we'll have to get in some practice sometime. What say we link up on this?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Let's do!"

"Take over, Kit!" Three approvals came as one, and:

"QX, Kit," came Kathryn's less enthusiastic concurrence, a moment later. Naturally enough, she would rather do it alone if she could; but she had to admit that her brother's plan was the better.